“Gerry
Adams, his gaze at this point still firmly fixed on the past, liked to claim
that Irish profits were being sucked away by `England', but in fact it was
America that predominated.”

“(I)one looks at the Republic of Ireland over the last thirty
years in religious terms, it is hard not to think of that standard exam
question for students of Irish history: `Why did the Reformation not succeed in
Ireland?' And answer: `It did, but it took four hundred and fifty years.'”

“…that other power struggle going on south of the border,
down Merrion way: the battles within Fianna Fail.”

“As power was assumed by a figure variously compared by his
opponents to Salazar, Nixon and Dracula, the shape of a new kind of New Ireland
came into view.”

“[Conor] Cruise O'Brien once remarked that he would not
believe Haughey's political career was over until he saw him buried at a
crossroads with his mouth full of garlic and a stake through his heart.
Politically speaking, that point had finally been reached.”

“O'Neill's clipped, pragmatic, patrician tone … owed far more
to the style of metropolitan Conservative Party cabals than to the sclerotic
huddles of Ulster village politics.”

Charles Haughey

Foster is no mere comedian, though, and the book is no mere
cartoonish collection, like those slim volumes one finds at the cash register
of bookstores full of zany things said by or about Sarah Palin or George Bush or
Bill Clinton. Foster’s good jokes are
always in service of his theme, as when he quotes an outrageous eulogy to
Haughey’s sympathies to Northern Ireland, which extended to running guns to the
IRA, and contrasts this with the later noticeable cooling of Haughey’s zeal for
the North. Rather than merely cite this as one more instance of opportunism by
a political crook on a scale unimaginable in most countries, Foster ties his
antics and his shifting sympathies to a changing mood in Ireland, and thereby
makes him more than an adorable, venal rogue. Thirty-six years after the 1970 trial precipitated by Haughey’s gun smuggling, Foster writes:

“what seemed much
clearer was how quickly he had distanced himself from the `problem of the
North'. This strategy had enabled him to return to the forefront of politics by
1979 – and, once in power, his Northern policies diverged more and more from
traditional pieties. Haughey's own story reflected events and movements in the
nation at large.”

2 Comments:

Your postings about Irish history remind me of my readings in English history -- especially the 16th century. The English schemes to subdue and dominate Ireland through plantations and militarism were reprehensible. But the arrogance of colonialism was all the rage for too many countries for too many centuries. Ironically, even the U.S. could not seem to learn from English history. Well, at least we have no plantation schemes (yet) in Iraq and Afghanistan. But perhaps I am trying to create corollaries were none exist. In any case, I think I am on the verge of revisiting my readings 16th century English history. Thanks for the provocation.

As it happens, one of the targets of Foster's occaional barbs at Irish nationalism is its atavistic sniping at England rather than the U.S. when people began to be alarmed by extensive foreign investment during the Celtic Tiger economic boom.

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This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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